


Kalopsia

by patriciaselina



Category: Free!
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Past Lives, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, POV First Person, Past Lives, Princes & Princesses, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 12:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1648292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patriciaselina/pseuds/patriciaselina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i><b>kalopsia</b> n. the delusion of things being more beautiful than they really are</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>There is a kind of love worth dying for, a kind of love worth waiting for, and a kind of love that only seems more beautiful, more righteous and <em>correct</em>, when viewed in the face of so many missed or lost or sacrificed chances. Even though Rei Ryugazaki no longer remembers any of these prior chances, he knows that these kinds of love all refer to one and the same phenomena, and that’s enough, for now.</p><p>(A MakoRei reincarnation AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kalopsia

**Author's Note:**

> [This fic has an FST now!](http://patriciaselina.tumblr.com/post/86603016321/kalopsia-n-the-delusion-of-things-being-more)

 

I. 

The first time we meet, as our last meeting does as well, it’s because of the water.

Or in this case: the rain. I wasn’t _supposed_ to stop, for stopping would put me off schedule, and _important_ things shan’t be put off schedule. I always knew that the quest I was on, being made out of love, was one of them, an important thing – but I also knew that I had been on this stallion’s back for what had seemed to be close to forever, and that the stifling regalia of a knight-errant felt a thousand times worse on my battered bones after being drenched in heaven-sent tears.

…speaking of heaven-sent things.

I also knew, at that very moment, that when the tall man with the green eyes smiled at me, there was suddenly nowhere else in the world I was supposed to be, but _right by his side_. He was just so beautiful and to be completely honest with you, I would have been even _more_ surprised if I didn’t stop and forget everything in the face of him and his smile.

So I fall for him, deeply, madly, inconsiderately in regards of all the plans and schedules I was supposed to be bound to in the first place, and he falls for me. Tells me so, that he shall love me forever, and there is a gravity to his words that has nothing and yet everything to do with the fact that we are in love.

Which is why the look the red-headed princess shoots me when I return to the castle with him on my arm shouldn’t ache as much as it does, not when we’re _happy_ and _in love_. Nor should the fact that she knows my family history like the back of her hand and plays an enchanting tune on the lute, while he knows little else but swimming and fishing and being in love with me.

What I heard him tell my father, in between ragged sobs, shouldn’t have driven me away from him, not when I love him so, but it does.

“Why do you weep, man? Her Grace is not going to stand in the way of your marriage to my son. She respects my son’s choices, as do I.” my father had said, lips pulled taut as if he had just swallowed something sour. He does not approve of our union – expected, men are not exactly supposed to wed other men, not when there’s a nearby _princess_ more than able to do me the same honor – so this is of no surprise to me.

“She will take him away from me,” _he_ had said in reply, none of the man I loved left in the wobbling syllables of his tearful words, nothing left in him but despair and heartbreak and utter _resignation_ to what would happen next. “She will take him away from me, of this I am certain.”

“So what if she does?” my father asked, distrust lacing the curiosity in his voice. “Would that be so terrible?”

“If he deceives me,” says the man I love, no, _recites_ , as if he heard these words from someone else and it physically pains him to do nothing more than say them as their original speaker did exactly, “He will die.”

My father scoffed. “Men have been known to survive such things.”

“Not this one.” I heard him say, quietly, and I can’t even remember what happened next but long story short that is the last I hear of him, of the strange and beautiful man I love, not until the years have passed and I am finally married to the princess with the flame red hair, to my father’s delight.

Not until the fishermen step aside and the world around me shifts so that the only thing I see is _him_ with a fisherman’s net draped around his tanned body like clothing, his broad shoulders slumped in defeat and his lower lip quivering.

I kissed him on those lips, once, on the very night of the day we first met. It feels so far away, now.

His eyes are still greener than anything I have ever seen and it just makes sense, it just makes sense that something so beautiful would not be human, would be anything _but_ human, in fact, and even though I know this now I just can’t believe I was such a lovesick fool to not have noticed this before.

Not that I am _not_ still lovesick over him of course. I still love him. I actually still do love him, and this surprises me.

I am aware that I say something – a _lot_ of things, actually, things about him being unnatural and malicious and having no place in the world I live in – but for some reason all of this is irrelevant to the fact that _I still love this man_ , still ache for him with every fiber of my being, still want to take him in my arms and hold him close to me until the world around us ceases to insist.

The flame-haired princess – my _wife_ now, I guess, in all but ceremony – squeezes my hand, once, as if she knew what I was thinking but knows not what to do with this information, only that I shouldn’t be thinking of this. But I still do. This man in front of me is being sentenced to sorcery and a public execution and I still love him.

“Wait,” a man speaks, dark-haired and blue-eyed and I should not be noticing how the green-eyed man’s gaze shifts so _effortlessly_ to his face as he speaks, I haven’t got the right to, but I do, “This man is not human, yes, he can call upon the earth and the heavens to do his bidding, yes. But you forgot one thing.”

“You forgot that as soon as he fell in love with this knight, he gave up _everything_. He sealed away his powers so that he may be considered a human being worthy of that man’s love. So I compel you to write this down so it may be set down in history – that this man is the most human being that ever lived. He _chose_ to be human.” The dark-haired man shook his head. “Chose to be human, in a world where humans would shun their mortality as soon as they were given the choice.”

So instead of a public execution he gets a private one, but it makes no difference, the fact remains that he will still die and I still love him. The dark-haired one bids him close and whispers something in his ear, something said softly enough that I cannot make out the words from this distance and this distraction I feel as the dark-haired one’s fingers curl around _his_ neck.

He stands in front of me shortly afterwards, and somewhere in the middle of memorizing his face before he gets hauled off to leave me forever, the words just slip out of me, as easily as the rain had fallen from the clouds that day when we met. _I will lose you forever and we won’t even get to spend the afterlife together, and I love you._

“I wish you did not love me,” he says, frantic, tearful, as my hands run across every inch of his face; his brow, his sideburns, his trembling jaw. “It would have been easier.”

I close my eyes, think the words _if he deceives me, he will die_ and don’t even know why I do so. “I still do. I always have. Ever since the day we met.” _Ever since I kissed you and you kissed me back._

We talk about that day, that single drop in the wellspring of eternity when the world was nothing but me and him and the rain flowing freely around us. “I remember telling you that I would never forget that moment,” he says, “The moment before you kissed me.”

There’s something that he’s supposed to be saying after that, I’m aware, something prefaced by _but_ , but I have my mouth on his before he could even begin to voice the word.

He kisses back, then, and just like that, everything ceases to exist.

Including, I realize, belatedly, as I slump over in his embrace, my own life.

.

.

II.

The next time we meet it’s not actually technically a _meeting_ , because I am a dead, lifeless body strewn carelessly about his feet like a thoughtlessly thrown piece of garbage, and as far as I know looking over someone’s corpse doesn’t exactly entail meeting them.

I hear his voice, still, despite the fact that I am for all intents and purposes medically and emotionally and literally _dead_ , which is a surprise to my rapidly declining system, but I’m already dead so there’s nothing I can do to express my concern about it.

“Mister, this is a very handsome young man you have lying here,” he says, and at that single word he speaks I am suddenly assaulted with images of soft hair and warm eyes and the ocean, and the words _I wish you did not love me, it would have been easier_. “Is there any way that you could bring him back to life for me?”

Nobody speaks, for a long amount of time, and there is this palpable tension in this air so thick that I would’ve drowned in it had I still been alive enough to experience being drowned. Someone hitches on a breath – surely something _big_ is happening here, something my dead brain still struggles to grasp and comprehend, but as the last sense that fades away is not sight but _hearing_ it only makes sense that I can only hear what happens around me.

“No. Not that one.” another man says, and something about how _instantly_ I just knew that this wasn’t the first man who spoke should get to me, should _mean something_ for me, but as things are I don’t remember what it would have been.

And besides, I’m _dead_. It’s not as if knowing what that was would do me any good.

Another thing about the second man’s voice: it sounds _sorry_ , for some reason, regretful, seeking penance. But from whom? The first man, who from the hushed footfalls and hitching breaths seems to still be hovering over my body, or me, the dead man?

“That’s just too bad, it’s such a waste,” I hear the first man say, his voice suddenly so close that he’s probably taking his face in my hands, pressing his warm palms to my cold cheeks, only I can hear but not feel so I can’t be too sure if that’s actually what he is doing right now. “If only he were alive…I would have loved him so much.”

 _I wish you did not love me, it would have been easier_.

I no longer know if these were his words, or mine.

.

.

III.

The third time we meet, he is so young, just so young, _too_ young in fact, and effortlessly beautiful.

His sister is quite probably a third my age and has long jet-black hair and ocean-blue eyes that pierce into my soul like daggers, but even though I am aware of the fact that she is obviously very beautiful, I find myself hopelessly drawn to him, like a moth to a flame.

Feeling this way about him is shameful, I am aware, even though I have never been less than twenty paces away from his person, even when I have never actually even _spoken_ to him.

Still I spend my restless days looking at him, following his beautiful body as he goes about enjoying himself on the beach, play-wrestling with a handsome young redhead who laughs like a hooligan, makes me see red and snap a good many fountain pens, and makes him smile every time without even having to try.

Still I trail after him and his family as they walk around town like any other tourist would do, him and his parents and his dark-haired elder sister, and the twins – his little brother and sister.

Still, in the darkness of the spring night, when he looks my way come dinnertime and _smiles_ a smile that brightens up his entire face, I run out the dining halls without even caring if anybody sees, pressing a clenched fist to my chest so I can feel my ragged heartbeat.

“You mustn’t smile like that,” I hear myself say, to nobody in particular, eyes dazed whilst the flowers around me assaulted my nose with their scent, in an attempt to steal my attentions, with no success on that part. “One must not smile like _that_ , at all, at anyone, especially not _you_.”

 _I love you_ , I also hear myself say into the darkness of the night, but those words mean little, not when I never truly intend on saying them to the one they were meant for. Not when I’m over sixty years old and he’s barely twelve.

I don’t think I would tell these words to him even if our ages match up, though. Because why would he ever return my feelings, when he’s so _beautiful_ and I’m nothing more than a highly educated nobody?

I inevitably expire a few days soon after my confession in the gardens – predictably, because of course when one ends up putting the existence of handsome children one is hopelessly in love with in one’s immediate vicinity over one’s own existence, there is nothing left for one to do but die.

Before this happens, though, I see him looking back at me from where he stands, watching the ocean just a few minutes ago, and he smiles. Actually _smiles_ , at _me_ , just like he had that night, when I whispered _I love you_ to the rose bushes and hoped he wouldn’t hear just as much as I hoped he did hear. Then he stretched out his arm, offered me – _me_ – his hand to take.

And – despite my slowing heart beat and blurring vision – I took it, intending full well, as I always knew I would, to follow him.

.

.

IV.

The fourth time we meet, actually honest-to-goodness _meet_ , not just exchange second-long glances in the middle of the marketplace or slash into each other’s hearts in the battlefield, centuries had passed and I still do love him, even when I’m fully aware that I shouldn’t be doing so in the first place, even when I don’t remember loving him before.

There are a multitude of reasons why I shouldn’t be in love with him, one of them being that he is Crown Prince and most probably has some princess waiting for him to take her hand in marriage back home.

Another is that when I took his royal sleepy, tranquilizer-addled highness under my wing to show him around the city, I did so fully intending to betray his trust by extracting from him a rare inside story about his royal family that would catapult me into journalistic superstardom and pay off all the debts I recently owed my co-worker, a blond wrecking ball of pure energy who takes pictures like an artist makes his masterpieces, slaughters me at poker games, and laughs about it after.

Another reason – the _most important_ one, in fact – was that as far as I know people are not supposed to fall this maddeningly far in love after a mere twenty-four hours, tops. Things like this are supposed to take months. Years. Maybe even centuries.

But he coughed over the cigarette my co-worker offered him and worried so much when I acted as if my hand was in fact eaten by the _Bocca della Verita_ , wished upon the wall heavy with years of trust and faith and messages. He had danced with me on the last hours before midnight and jumped off the barge holding my hand and he had told me that he loved me, not in so many words, but _he loved me_. With his earnest, almost childlike naïveté it would be of no surprise to anyone if he loved me more than I do him.

But then sometimes he looks into my eyes like _that_ and he _smiles_ and my heart expands under my skin and I doubt that, I _seriously_ doubt that we love each other anything less than equally.

He is still the first one who pulls away, however. “Don’t tell me anything,” he says, pressing a finger to my mouth before I can say the words _I love you_ , which is unnecessary because even if I didn’t actually tell him, from the look in his eyes right now, I know that he knows of my emotions already. And that knowing the feelings are requited _pains_ him. “Please don’t tell me anything. Just take me back.”

“Okay,” I murmur, because he said _don’t **tell me** anything_ , not _don’t **say** anything_ , and there’s a difference in that. I can say words, so long as they are empty and worthless and not anything that would make him throw everything away to be with me.

There’s a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that tells me that someone has chosen that option before; that someone has given everything up in the sake of love and ended up with nothing but loss in return. But instead of prying apart this feeling so I can understand it further, I only wrap my knuckles tighter around the steering wheel, trying very hard not to think of how tightly he had wrapped his arms around me when we were on the Vespa, earlier. Trying very hard not to think about how _easy_ it would be to disregard his instructions and drive in an opposite direction from the palace so I can keep him to myself forever.

But that would be like the wife from heaven whose husband kept her wings to himself so that she wouldn’t ever leave him behind. If I drove him somewhere else – in effect doing the same as the lying husband – he would hate me, and I would rather love him hopelessly than have him hate me.

“I want you to stay in the car and drive away. Don’t look back.” he says – _don’t look back_ , as if I was Lot, fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah. “Just leave me as I leave you.”

“All right.” I say, swallowing down the lump in my throat. I must not fall apart. For his sake, as well as my own.

“I don’t know how to say goodbye,” he tells me, tears dropping carefully down his cheeks. “Well, actually I do, but this isn’t the kind of goodbye you give delegates or civilians or…anyone else that protocol applies to, in fact. This feels different. _Realer,_ somehow.”

Nevertheless we bid each other farewell with our tears and stilted words and the warm insistent pressure of his lips against mine and when he unbuckles his seatbelt and walks away I don’t – _can’t_ – bring myself to move. I am losing him but I do little else but start the engine and drive away, just as he told me to. Like he wanted me to.

For his sake, as well as my own, I think, bitterly, as tears gather ‘round my eyes, blurring my vision and turning the beauty of this city into one big senseless blur. Just like my life without him, then, one senseless blur. But his duties run deep as the blood in his veins, family and duty all mixed together thoroughly enough for him to deem it more important than anything else, even his own happiness.

The next day is the day I see him just before he leaves. In the context of work, of course, so he is always an arm’s length away from me, for when all is said and done he is the beloved Crown Prince and I am just a low-ranking journalist from a paper whose readership is so low as to be negligible. That I am in love with him is not important.

What is important, however, is that when asked which of the cities he’s been to is his favorite, the Crown Prince looks at me and says the name of this city, says that he shall never forget it for as long as he lives. _Because_ , he tells me with his gaze, greener than anything I’ve ever seen in all my life, _this is the city where I loved you_.

The day ends with us walking away from each other, but in spite of everything, I can feel the smile as it spreads throughout my face.

.

.

V.

The fifth time, it is _I_ who is not of this world, this time around, but – most probably because some unknown force watching over the universe _really doesn’t like me_ – we still have to say goodbye.

There’s really nothing overcomplicated about it. It’s just that I’m really not supposed to be here, and alien overlords don’t care whether or not their charges have fallen for anyone during their stay on Earth, only if said charges could be sent back to the home planet, whether willingly or not.

I can speak millions of languages, from this world and from the others; I can decimate entire battalions with my mind, and I can leap from impossible heights and hold the entire world in my bare hands, but none of this does anything to lessen the pain I feel spreading through my heart when I realize that I have to leave him, or rather, _her_ – in this life, he is a woman, beautiful and poised and unmistakably _perfect_ in a way even my own alien race has failed to mimic so effortlessly, so gracefully, as she does.

Right now I should regret being the cause of such a beautiful woman’s tears, but that would entail my regretting loving her, and I will never do that. Not when it’s the only good thing I ever remember doing.

I am aware, of course, that if only I did not love her, leaving Earth would have been easier. But I don’t think I care as to whether or not I’ve made things _difficult_ for myself – let it be difficult. For some reason I just know that I will find her no matter where I go, and even as my craft leaves the Earth’s atmosphere, this is the only thing in my mind.

I will always find her, or him, and I will never regret what I feel.

.

.

.

.

.

 

“I’m happy you’re here, Makoto- _senpai_.”

I don’t know why I say those words, but I do and this is what makes Makoto- _senpai_ look up from his notes, math homework temporarily forgotten for the moment. From the look on his face it looks as if he wished that he could forget about said homework _permanently_ , but that’s something I’ll talk to him about later. After I’m done putting my foot out of my mouth, it seems.

“It’s nothing, Rei. Besides, it was the least I could do.” Makoto- _senpai_ says, again with that _smile_ of his. I have a feeling that he could kill me with that smile, if he wanted to, though I can’t seem to imagine him ever wanting to. “Sorry I didn’t get Haru to come with me, though. Or Nagisa. Even though you were so kind as to offer your place for our study session…”

“I don’t mind,” I say, and in spite of the fact that I am supposed to be at least a little bit annoyed, because Nagisa was the one who volunteered my apartment in the first place and for some reason he just didn’t show, or because Haruka- _senpai_ was the one who needed help in English and according to Makoto- _senpai_ he didn’t even bother to get out of his beloved bathtub, I find myself actually _meaning_ what I said.

_I don’t mind that they aren’t here, because you are._

Like my earlier words, I don’t know why I find myself thinking that. I feel my cheeks burn red anyway. It’s not as if I didn’t see this happening – after all, Makoto- _senpai_ is six feet tall, broad-shouldered, tan-skinned, and muscular, with soft brown hair and softer green eyes that burn a hole of hopeless, illogical _longing_ in my very soul each and every time he looks my way, it’s only logical that I, with my love for beautiful things, would end up loving him in some way.

What I didn’t see happening, however, is how _deeply_ these feelings have been ingrained within me, even though I’ve known him for less than a year, now; I’m still in my first year of high school and it’s been mere months since he smiled softly and told me that I might as well try swimming, at the Samezuka poolside, and I had closed my eyes in an effort to will away my blush. It was just a crush, I thought then, as I still stubbornly do now; just a reaction to seeing so much beauty in a single person up close.

But it isn’t; the feeling I have for him is definitely nothing less than a _love_ that someone had been taking care of for as long as the world began, and this is what scares me the most.

“That’s good, then.” Makoto- _senpai_ says, the soft smile of his still set firmly in place as he looks back down onto his notes, his eyes meeting mine for a few negligible seconds, a twinkling of some nameless emotion I’ve never seen from him before bringing out the gold flecks in his eyes with its sudden radiance.

I don’t know what that means, or what it means that butterflies are swarming in my stomach in response, but what matters to me right here right now is that _he’s here_ , and that’s, for some reason, everything I could ask for.

“I’m happy being here with you too, Rei.”

.

.

.

 _fin._  

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> I’ve always wanted to write this. Ever since before I started writing _Retrouvaille_ , so you could probably say that this is the first fic idea I ever had since joining the Free!dom. And, as would be expected from me by now, it’s another AU.
> 
> …to be specific a _collection_ of MakoRei AUs. There’s actually more to this idea than these few scenes I’ve written out, a Master’s Sun AU and a BBC Sherlock/CBS Elementary AU, but after reading (and _re_ -reading) [_La Confidenza_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1156564/chapters/2346474) I’ve since decided to cut the AUs/past lives down to four. So we have an Ondine AU, a Death in Venice AU, a Roman Holiday AU, and, a bit jarringly enough, a He Who Came From The Stars AU. (My references come from all over the place.)
> 
> The _Ondine_ AU was split in two because I really wanted Makoto to say Ondine’s last words (“ _What a pity! [If he were alive] How I should have loved him_!”) This is also the part where, in between this and the Roman Holiday AU below as well as the Sabrina AU I’m interested in doing, I realize that I keep casting Makoto in Audrey Hepburn’s roles. Makoto is Ondine, Rei is the knight Hans, Gou is Rei’s supposed betrothed Princess Bertha, and Haru is the Old One.
> 
>  _Death in Venice_ is, as one may remember me saying before, my favourite novella. It’s the story of a senior citizen uptight German textbook author falling for a beautiful Polish (?) preteen boy, and despite the fact that it’s supposed to be weird and I know full well that it’s weird, it’s actually a rather heart-wrenching story. Rei is von Aschenbach, (shota-version) Makoto is Tadzio and fem!Haru is one of his big sisters, (shota-version) Rin is Tadzio’s supposed BFF Jashu.
> 
> I once used to write a _Roman Holiday_ AU when I was in the Hetalia PH fandom – back then a fic of such length was daunting to me, and I felt very pleased with myself when I was writing it, but looking back on it now there was a lot of things I wanted to change in it. Makoto is Princess Ann, Rei is Gregory Peck’s American journo, and Nagisa is his photographer co-worker.
> 
> As for _He Who Came From The Stars_ / _My Love From Another Star_ – now that AU came from nowhere; it was written before I knew I was doing so, somehow.
> 
> I stubbornly decided to have the boys not referred to with their names for the past lives, which is in fact easier to do when writing in first person. This is so one may imagine them being called by any period- and country-specific name as they may want.
> 
> Again, thanks for reading this! I hope you liked it.
> 
>  
> 
>  


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